Funny, I independently arrived at the exact same conclusion. He's incredibly easy to read and predict because every single opinion he holds is based on his ego. Like for example, when people ask him why he developed his own engine for his games, he'll answer that it's because other devs take shortcuts and he doesn't. But dude, the entire point of not making your own engine or language is not because anyone's lazy, but because it allows you to focus your precious time on more important stuff like the actual gameplay, the story, etc. Maybe then it wouldn't take more than 10 years to release a video game.

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benjiro29 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The thing is, making your own game engine can be beneficial because a lot of engines are so general that you may lose a lot of performance benefits. We have seen this issue with how custom engines pushed the boundaries of games to a extreme, but when games moved to cookie cutter engines because it was cheaper (well, that has changed also), but in return they ran into issues with limitations on the engines or performance issues.

Now with LLMs the entire "make your own engine that is optimized for your game" is ironically back. But people like Blow balk at the idea that a LLM can make a game engine.

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dezsiszabi 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't really care why he does his own engine or language. "Because I wanted to" would be a sufficient amswer to me.

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nsagent a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If he was honest with himself, he would rightly say he did those things for his own edification. If you have the time and ability. As someone who also cares deeply about his craft and spends more effort than I probably should improving my personal tooling, I'm clearly all for it.

Is it strictly necessary? Most certainly not. I've met equally dedicated and talented individuals who are fine adapting to existing tooling and working around idiosyncrasies rather than improving the tooling. That personally drives me batshit, but I can stomach it if required.

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willdr 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He also decided to wield this new language that is God’s gift to game programming to build… a block-pushing game?

	▲	djaro 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's the confusing thing to me. At least with a game like Factorio they made their own engine because they had to simulate thousands of machines and millions of items moving around each tick. But a sokoban-type game with cartoony graphics, that would be fine on off-the-shelf Unity or even something like Godot. Like, I've played HTML5 games with more demanding graphics.
	▲	dezsiszabi 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A very good and large Sokoban game though. I've been playing it since release and still only at 460 puzzles. The counter goes up to 920 as far as I know. It's also very well designed in my opinion. Love the way the ideas are introduced and built on top of each other.

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bena a day ago | parent | prev [-]

And he likely spent a good portion of those 10 years making sure it had "most pzzles evar" as if the only difference between quantity and quality was spelling.

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CountingCount a day ago | parent [-]

Having played his game with the "most pzzles evar" I do think many of them are also consistently high quality. That said 10 years for this game does seem excessive.

	▲	KingMob 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Writing your own language/engine is the province of wealthy dilettantes and those with day jobs. Blow can afford to work on his lang and game for 10 years, but most people can't.